This is a welcome WBF with some good points/ideas made by Rand. I think it's important to remember that content pages really need strong SEO from it's parent pages to really be effective, which takes some time. If you have a look at Amazon (one of the best in creating unique product pages) then it takes their pages a while to get ranking (which I know is not the "be all and end all"). However, it's their Category pages that have strong SEO which pass down SEO to the product page.

I work for an e-commerce retailer who has millions of product pages across various categories (similar to Amazon). We have unique content via customer reviews, sales ranking of item in our store, and with key product we invest time to create unique descriptions. The pages are indexed quickly but I feel this is down to SEO on upper pages being passed down, so don't lose focus on your parent pages or you will be missing an important contributor. From my experience in a competitive market if your competition has superior SEO on it's homepage and category pages then it's likely they will rank better on product pages.

Of course, UGC is very important to create a community around your store and the more people actively participating is great, so make sure your customers can easily share their reviews on their websites/social pages as if they have taken the time to write a review then a lot of them like to share what they have written with their friends (and you get more links!).
August 27, 2010

A very good post Rand, and one that is not caught up in all the overexcitement of Facebook's annoucement. The 'like' buttons will be a good addition to generate traffic to sites, but it falls way short of Google as it currently stands. May 02, 2010

that is a good point. with all my link building i approach it with a personal touch so potential partners know i have researched their site and in some cases the person themselves (i work for an online entertainment retailer who sells cds, dvds, games, books etc so knowing the person's product can help).

i also receive link requests with no introduction from the company requesting a link, only the bare details (of which most are for sites not related to our site). these get deleted pretty much straight away as there is no thought put into the contact.